Between Individualism and Socialism: Deleuze's Micropolitics of Desire By

Between Individualism and Socialism: Deleuze’s Micropolitics of Desire by Jeffrey A. Bell Southeastern Louisiana University Of the important French philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century, Gilles Deleuze stands unquestionably as one of the most influential. Alongside contemporaries such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Deleuze is generally considered an equal in terms of importance. Despite this recognition, however, Deleuze’s philosophy has not left much of an impact upon contemporary political theory, which is ironic since Deleuze, along with frequent co-author Felix Guattari, dedicated large portions of a number of their books to political questions. One reason for this oversight, perhaps, is due to the at times obscure terminology used by Deleuze. It may also be due to the perception that Deleuze’s political theory is not greatly different from Foucault’s, and thus the work of the latter is given precedence. Whatever the reason, we feel that given the recognized importance of Deleuze there is a notable absence of attention given to his political theory. In this essay we will begin to rectify this situation. Our effort to expound Deleuze’s political theory will attempt to do three things. First, we shall offer an interpretation of several key concepts, concepts that are crucial to understanding Deleuze’s political theory adequately. There are a number of concepts in Deleuze’s work, especially in the books he wrote with Guattari, but for our purposes we will focus upon four – viz. immanence, multiplicities, assemblages, and function. By clarifying the role these concepts play in Deleuze’s work we can then begin to place his thought in relationship to other political theories. Our second main objective will be to do 2 just this, to compare and contrast Deleuze’s political theory with what we will describe as the individual-centered theory of Robert Nozick and the society-centered theory of John Rawls. By setting forth Deleuze’s conceptual apparatus we will lay the groundwork for demonstrating the inadequacies, at least from Deleuze’s perspective, of the alternatives offered by Nozick and Rawls. With this in place we will turn to our third and final objective, which will be to begin laying out what political activism will mean in the context of Deleuze’s theory. What this will mean, we shall see, is that it entails finding the times, places, and circumstances to become revolutionary. I The most important concept in all of Deleuze’s work is ‘immanence’. Throughout Deleuze’s published writings, immanence is repeatedly contrasted with the philosophies of transcendence, and the philosophers Deleuze frequently returns to – Scotus, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Leibniz, and Hume – each offers, as Deleuze understands them, important contributions to the philosophy of immanence. So what are these contributions and what is the philosophy of immanence? Put simply, a philosophy of immanence is an attempt to understand the emergence of identities, whether social, political, individual, ontological, etc., in a manner that does not entail a condition that transcends the conditioned. Plato, for example, would offer an explanation where the condition – the Forms or Ideas – does indeed transcend the conditioned. The Form of justice is separate from and is a truth that transcends each and every institution of justice that might emerge and approximate this Form.1 A philosophy of immanence, by contrast, will speak of the condition as being in 1 Not all commentators would agree that Plato was a philosopher of transcendence. Alain Badiou, for instance, argues that Plato’s Forms are the immanence within which the things that participate in this form 3 the conditioned. Spinoza, for instance, is held up as the “prince of philosophers” by Deleuze,2 and precisely because he argued that God is Nature (Deus sive Natura), or the condition (God) is in and inseparable from the conditioned (Nature). In clarifying this point, Deleuze differentiates between an “emanative” and an “immanent” cause. An “emanative cause,” Deleuze argues, “produces through what it gives, but is beyond what it gives”; an immanent cause, on the other hand, is one where “its effect is ‘immanate’ in the cause, rather than emanating from it. What defines an immanent cause is that its effect is in it – in it, of course, as in something else, but still being and remaining in it.”3 A consequence of this understanding of immanence is the equality of being, or the non-hierarchical nature of reality. Deleuze is clear on this point: “From the viewpoint of immanence the distinction of essence does not exclude, but rather implies, an equality of being: it is the same being that remains in itself in the cause, and in which the effect remains as in another thing.”4 In other words, unlike Plato’s Forms where the Form is the condition that is beyond (transcends) the conditioned and operates as the superior model the conditioned can only approximate, an immanent condition contains the conditioned within it, not as a degraded imitation but as a modification of the being of the condition itself. To cite an example, and an example that will become more important later on as we develop the political theoretical implications of Deleuze’s philosophy, capitalism is for Deleuze a system of immanent causation. In an essay detailing his affinity with Marxism, why in fact Deleuze and Guattari “remain Marxists,” Deleuze argues that it is appear. See Alain Badiou, Deleuze, translated by Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 2 Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy, translated by Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990), p. 11. 3 Ibid., p. 172. 4 Ibid. 4 precisely because Marx offers an “analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that continually redraws its proper limits, and that always finds itself increasing by steps, for the limit is Capital itself.”5 Whenever a new market is discovered or opened, this market becomes incorporated into the Capitalist system itself, though an expanded system (e.g. the expansion of capitalism into China where labor and the products of labor become commodities). These expanded limits are an effect of capitalism but are within capitalism itself as an effect in the cause. Moreover, as an immanent system capitalism entails a fundamental equality of being in that all things are equal insofar as they are commodities – they can be bought and sold on the open market. Related to Deleuze’s emphasis on the philosophy of immanence are two further concepts – univocity and multiplicity. Univocity is simply the term Deleuze uses, borrowing it from Duns Scotus, to refer to the equality of being. There is not a hierarchy of being, but rather being is expressed in the same sense – the condition and conditioned each expresses the same being – whereas the Platonic position holds that some beings (the Forms) express more being than others. One cannot say, according to Plato, that the eternal, unchanging forms are in the same sense that the things of the mortal and changing world are, and yet this is just what Scotus (and Deleuze) argues. Tied to univocity is the concept of multiplicity. Multiplicity emerges as a necessary concept for Deleuze because of his philosophy of immanence and the attendant equality of being. As 5 Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers (Paris: Les Éditions des Minuit, 1990), p. 232. Translation mine. This same point was made several times in Deleuze’s early work, Anti-Oedipus. To cite just one example, Deleuze and Guattari argue that “It is in fact essential that the limit of the decoded flows of desiring production be doubly exorcised, doubly displaced, once by the position of immanent limits that capitalism does not cease to reproduce on an ever expanding scale, and again by the marking out of an interior limit that reduces this social reproduction to restricted familial reproduction.” Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia translated by Robert Hurly (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 304. The concept of “decoded flows” and “desiring production” will be clarified below as we discuss the concepts of multiplicity and assemblages. 5 Deleuze defines multiplicity, “it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, ‘multiplicity,’ that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world.”6 In other words, for Deleuze a multiplicity is what he would call a nomadic distribution of a fundamentally non- hierarchical being (univocity), a distribution that cannot be reduced to identifiable unities. Deleuze and Guattari are straightforward on this point: The rhizome [or multiplicity7] is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One or to which One is added (n + 1). It is not composed of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills.8 To understand a multiplicity in terms of the One or as a multiple of units (the French word used here is unités, which means both units and unities) would be to relate it to a privileged form of being, to a being that operates as “emanative cause” in that the things that come to be identified come to be by virtue of a One or multiple that transcends them. Socrates makes this position clear in the Euthyphro. It is not the diversity and multiplicity of pious actions that interests Socrates, but rather he wants “to know what is characteristic of piety which makes all pious actions pious.” (6e). Whatever their apparent diversity, there is from the perspective of Plato a privileged unity that is superior to the diversity it conditions.

Load more